by Hal Foster, Special for USA TODAY

by Hal Foster, Special for USA TODAY

Kazakhstan decided a few years ago that it should use its vast prairie land to create one of the biggest beef industries in the world.

The globe's ninth-largest nation has made a good start by importing thousands of Angus and Hereford cattle from the United States, Canada and Australia as the vanguard for a premium-beef herd it hopes will number in the millions some day.

But it's learning there's more to becoming a beef powerhouse than just putting cattle on grassland. It also requires feedlots to fatten the animals, packing plants, distribution networks and marketing programs.

The former Soviet republic turned to an international marketing class at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn.

Five of Susan Geib's students produced a marketing plan for KazBeef, a company that led Kazakhstan's 4-year-old effort to establish a premium beef business.

"We've begun using feedlots, but we have few packing plants that can meet international food-safety standards, and we need channels to distribute and market the beef," which is where the students come in, said KazBeef Director Beibit Yerubayev.

Kazakhstan "looks like Nebraska in the 1870s. It doesn't even have fencing in a lot of places," said Jake Schubert, a native of Valentine, Neb., who is building corrals, holding pens and other facilities on a big family-owned ranch on the shores of Lake Balkhash in eastern Kazakhstan.

Finding a market

The domestic market for premium beef is limited, since Kazakhstan has only 17million people. But export opportunities are immense.

Both China, with about 1.4billion people, and Russia, with about 143million, border Kazakhstan, with other potential sales in Central Asia, Europe and the Middle East.

The Agriculture Ministry projects that Kazakhstan's beef exports will jump from today's minuscule 1,000 metric tons a year to 180,000 in 2020.

That would put Kazakhstan in position to break into the top 10 beef exporters by 2030. Belarus, which holds the 10th position now, exported 220,000 tons of beef in 2013, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department.

Few of Kazakhstan's beef exports are likely to find their way to the United States, whose 1.17million metric tons of exports in 2013 ranked it fourth globally. That's primarily because of the hefty shipping costs to export to such a distant location.

Yerubayev, based in Kazakhstan's capital of Astana, learned what it takes to run a world-class cattle operation while in the U.S.

After earning a master's degree in international business at Waynesburg University in Pennsylvania, he was Kazakhstan country manager for the U.S. Commerce Department in Washington from 2005 to 2008 and for the North Dakota Trade Office in Bismarck from 2008 to 2010.

When Kazakhstan's Agriculture Ministry encouraged him to head KazBeef in early 2010, he didn't hesitate. Yerubayev decided to create a company that could take KazBeef's cattle through every step, from feeding on grass to marketing to retailers.

"We were lucky to find a packing plant with modern Austrian equipment that had gone out of business near our ranch at Mamai," north of Astana, Yerubayev said. KazBeef expects to finish refurbishing it this summer to meet international standards.

Grilling rib-eyes

The solution to the company's marketing challenge came in an unexpected phone call from Geib at Concordia College.

She was director of the North Dakota Trade Office when Yerubayev worked there. She joined the college after she and her husband, Peter, spent 18 months in 18 countries studying emerging markets in the former Soviet Union.

Geib told Yerubayev she wanted her 20 students to do real-world international marketing projects. He agreed to let five students produce a marketing plan.

In May, the students presented their recommendations to him in a video call. One student, Emily Royer, said the team decided to focus on the Kazakhstan market first, which would be a springboard to exports later on.

A key thrust of the students' marketing plan is helping Kazakhs understand what premium beef is and how to prepare it. The country has millions of "village cows" - family-owned, non-purebred cattle, and Kazakhs "boil the meat" instead of grilling it, Geib said.

Among the students' suggestions is to give presentations to top restaurants and hotels and members of the national chefs association, and asking celebrity chefs to feature the meat on their television shows.

Royer, who just graduated, and Chris Haugstad, a junior who grew up on a dairy farm and worked on his uncle's beef ranch in Moorhead, will go to Kazakhstan in July to see its cattle industry.

The five-student team expects to use what Haugstad and Royer learn to produce a final marketing plan for KazBeef.

Royer said she hopes to see celebrity chefs doing programs that show viewers "this is how you prepare and cook a rib-eye steak."